In this regard, it's remarkable to consider what screenwriter William Goldman did some years back. He was offered the job of writing the first Godfather movie. A whole lot of money was put on the table. Goldman turned it down, saying he would have nothing to do with glamorizing such thugs.
Some record company executives might take note.
There is nothing in the First Amendment that says one deserves to get rich over Constitutionally-protected speech. Let it exist but lead to the trash can, not to the bank. Of course, it leads to the bank because so many enjoy it -- or at least pay for it. As long as we demand to be entertained by violence, the makers of violence will keep us happy and get wealthy doing it.
Apparently the William Goldmans of this world are few and far between.
1 comment:
The supply is there because of demand, but in this case I'd argue the demand is there because very little in popular culture shows how violence affects both the perpetrator and the victim, and if it does, it does it in a way that is preachy and irritating. Hollywood can barely put together an action movie that isn't laughable to people who really understand violence, let alone to put together something that people want to see and yet still manages to have an instructive value to it. Even if a film pulls it off, the audience has trouble getting it, because they're so used to watching crap. In "Saving Private Ryan" during the opening beach scene, a soldier gets his arm blown off and stops to bend down and pick his arm up and then shuffle off like a confused child looking for someone to fix it. People in the theater where I was watching this laughed. Not a lot of them, but clearly a few people were either laughing because they were uncomfortable or because they're so used to garbage that they're more likely to interpret violence as funny than they are to personalize violence and identify with the victim. And that's the root cause of violence. Not poverty, not drugs, and certainly not the weapons that people use, but rather the ability of a person to depersonalize other people. Something at which Hollywood gives us plenty of practice.
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